Michael Demson – författare

This volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the "age of revolutions" (c. 1750 1850), marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceive the fairness of a given legal order and work with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of "epistemic injustice" to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanize the rule of law.

This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the ‘age of revolutions’ from 1750 to 1850 – a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of ‘epistemic injustice’ to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.

Reflections on the Bicentenary of the 1819 Massacre of Reformers in Manchester Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence. Contributors explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of people to participate in government were reflected and revised in the verbal and visual culture of the time. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force.Key FeaturesProvides a multi-perspectival, historical revaluation of the violence of Peterloo Draws on contemporary theorizations of violence by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Rob Nixon to account for the cultural factors leading to PeterlooSupplements treatments of Peterloo centering on English history with attention to the significance of that event from Scottish, Irish and North American perspectives

Reflections on the Bicentenary of the 1819 Massacre of Reformers in Manchester Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence. Contributors explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of people to participate in government were reflected and revised in the verbal and visual culture of the time. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force.Key FeaturesProvides a multi-perspectival, historical revaluation of the violence of Peterloo Draws on contemporary theorizations of violence by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Rob Nixon to account for the cultural factors leading to PeterlooSupplements treatments of Peterloo centering on English history with attention to the significance of that event from Scottish, Irish and North American perspectives

Writing about Texas, Mexico, and Texan-Mexican relations for over four decades, Dick J. Reavis is one of the most poignant political voices of Texas—not as a politician, though his writings are infused with politics, but as a candid, unsentimental, probing, journalist. Author of ten books and hundreds of articles, Reavis has worked as a reporter, features author, and staff writer (San Antonio Express-News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dallas Observer, San Antonio Light), as an Associated Editor of Texas Monthly, and as a professor of journalism (North Carolina State University). Throughout his award-winning career, he has returned consistently to investigate the lives of everyday Texans, insistently challenging prevailing political assumptions. It was precisely this commitment that prompted him to investigate the federal government’s siege of the Branch Davidians in 1993 outside of Waco, TX, which led to perhaps his most notorious publication, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (1995). That project, however, needs to be contextualized in relation to the greater body of his writings, which includes investigations of Mexican guerillas and Texas biker-gangs, the struggles of urban day-laborers and of undocumented immigrants in rural areas, the politics of Texas Radicals during the Civil Rights movement, and the activities of the Klan across the state, to identify but a few. This collection of Reavis’s writings brings into focus the voice and political commitments of this critical, contemporary, Texas writer.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

By staging human-animal encounters, Romantic literature and art repeatedly questioned how "human" animals could be and how "animal" humans in fact are. Romantic-era authors and artists often depicted perplexing animal intrusions upon humans. Sometimes the intruders were mystifying or terrifying, like Coleridge’s albatross or Poe’s raven; sometimes they were mundane, as in “The Swallow” by Smith or “To a Mouse” by Burns-regardless, encounters with animal-others occasioned Romantic musings. This collection builds on existing scholarship while deploying new methodological approaches from gender studies, posthumanism, postcolonialism, disability studies, and digital studies to deepen our understanding of why animal-human encounters were so prevalent in the creative work and cultural discourse of the Romantic period, including the rhetoric of social movements like transatlantic abolitionism. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the range and complexity of Romantic representations of human-animal interactions and conceptualizations of animality, nonhuman life, and not-wholly-human life.  Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

By staging human-animal encounters, Romantic literature and art repeatedly questioned how "human" animals could be and how "animal" humans in fact are. Romantic-era authors and artists often depicted perplexing animal intrusions upon humans. Sometimes the intruders were mystifying or terrifying, like Coleridge’s albatross or Poe’s raven; sometimes they were mundane, as in “The Swallow” by Smith or “To a Mouse” by Burns-regardless, encounters with animal-others occasioned Romantic musings. This collection builds on existing scholarship while deploying new methodological approaches from gender studies, posthumanism, postcolonialism, disability studies, and digital studies to deepen our understanding of why animal-human encounters were so prevalent in the creative work and cultural discourse of the Romantic period, including the rhetoric of social movements like transatlantic abolitionism. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the range and complexity of Romantic representations of human-animal interactions and conceptualizations of animality, nonhuman life, and not-wholly-human life.  Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Masks of Anarchy tells the extraordinary story of Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy," its conception in Italy, its suppression in England, and how it became a rallying cry for workers across the Atlantic a century later. "Shake your chains to earth like dew," it implores. "Ye are many-they are few."In 1819, British troops attacked a peaceful crowd of demonstrators near Manchester, killing and maiming hundreds. News of the Peterloo Massacre, as it came to be known, traveled to the young English poet Percy Shelley, then living in Italy, who immediately sat down at his desk and penned one of the greatest political poems in the English language. His words would later inspire figures as wide-ranging as Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi-and also Pauline Newman, the woman the New York Times called the "New Joan of Arc" in 1907.Newman was a Jewish immigrant who grew up in the tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and came to be one of the leading organizers-and the first female organizer-of one of America's most powerful unions, the International Ladies' Garments Workers' Union. Marching with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the streets, Newman found Shelley's poetry a perennial source of inspiration.